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Title: Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology by Lawrence Venuti ISBN: 0-415-06051-6 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 May, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.99

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Selection of Insightful Essays
Comment: This collection of essays on translation questions translators' shadowy existence, and the still prevailing romantic tendency to define translation as a simulacrum, as a second-rate product that dates. It problematizes this tendency -followed by many translators themselves- that also celebrates the very "vanishing act" of the translator, and that declares successful a translation which reads smoothly and conveys the idea that it is not a translation at all. In other words, this anthology challenges this tradition that has been prone to valorize a translation of 'transparency' achieved through the domestication of the foreign text, that is, a transparency that has rendered translations consumable by obliterating or concealing the linguistic and cultural difference between the foreign text and its domestic avatars. Among the contributors to the collection are: Samia Mehrez, who writes on "Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text," Tom Conley, who deals with "Colors in Translation: Baudelaire and Rimbaud," and John Johnston, who engages with "Translation as Simulacrum."

These essays, by practicing translators of literary works, from both the Western and the Eastern worlds, wish to make readers aware of not only the political issues as they have related to the supremacy of transparent discourse in some historical periods; but also of the way they relate in contemporary translation and the theorizing of it. Along these lines, the contributors illustrate how, very often, fluent and canonized translations in different cultures have been the ones that have provided the reader "with the narcissistic experience of recognizing his or her own culture in a cultural other, enacting an imperialism that extends the dominion of transparency with other ideological discourses over a different culture" (5). In this way, these translations have not only contributed, but still contribute to the marginalization of other translations and texts, and also to the exclusion and/or commodification of cultures and social groups. At the same time, they have also fortified "the cultural and economic hegemony of target-language publishers" (5).

For instance, in his valuable essay, "Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation," Richard Jacquemond highlights the fact that the French book production dealing with the Arab world is still predominantly written by French or Western authors and translators, who still contribute to eternalize in the nonprofessional reader, who reads these translations out of curiosity, the dominant Western representations of Arab culture. The author goes on to question the apparent success of Nobel Prize winners' translations from older generations, specifically by Naguib Mahfouz. He argues that the wide acceptance of works by older bourgeois writers might rely on the fact that Western readers find either their preconceptions and representations of the orient; or conformity to the dominant Western ideological, moral, and aesthetics values validated in them. He goes on to emphasize how works by innovative and promising Egyptian writers of younger generations remain untranslated due to their 'lack of accessibility' and inscrutability.

In "The Language of Cultural Difference: Figures of Alterity in Canadian Translation," Sherry Simon questions, among other conceptions, "the humanist vision of translation as peaceful dialogue among equals, as the egalitarian pursuit of mutual comprehension" (160). To do so she makes a reading of the two first important English translations in 1890 and 1921 by two translators suffering from romantic infatuation with the literature and social values of French Canadian. Simon depicts how these paternalistic translators not only limit themselves to showing a pastoral and sentimental vision of French Canada, but how they also end up presenting it -through its superior understanding of the rural and natural realms- as irrevocably different from its English counterpart. At the end of her essay Simon calls for a more open understanding of English-Canadian and Quebec societies that so far has been "drastically limited " (174) by the tendency to attempt to grasp them "in terms of an English-French dialogue" (174) remaining thus oblivious to the plurality of these societies and to the variety of their regions.

On the other hand, in her essay "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation," Lory Chamberlain questions the gender politics represented in the apparently innovative discourse of the most prominent and canonized contemporary theorists of translation themselves. She depicts, among others, how George Steiner theorizes translation from the orthodox male point of view, presenting the act of translation as a violent sexual act of possession and penetration of the original text that, in the ideal case, should lead to the literal incorporation of the text. At the end of the act, the translator, in order to make up for the violence inflicted on the text, must "attempt to restore the balance" (64). As Chamberlain explains, the model suggested by Steiner in order to make up for the violent act is the one proposed by Lévi-Strauss, "which regards social structures as attempts at dynamic equilibrium achieved through an exchange of words, women, and material goods" (Strauss, quoted by Chamberlain 64). Chamberlain suggests that although some theorists' discourse does not focus primarily on "biological premises," in this prominent metaphoric rhetoric the socially constructed categories woman, man with all their misconceptions, and the social differences created between them, are perpetuated and presented as 'immutable' and irrevocably universal.

I strongly recommend the reading of this selection of insightful essays that offers persons interested in translation, or who wish to get into the world of this practice, the opportunity to take a look at the ideological and social dimensions, that have been and are still at work in this, apparently unobtrusive and marginalized act, and in the innovative efforts by some intellectuals to theorize it.

Rating: 5
Summary: A useful collection of essays
Comment: This book, edited and introduced by one of the most influential theorists in contemporary translation studies, would make a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in translation. It includes some very provocative essays by other translations scholars on the role of the translator, power dynamics in translation, translation as cultural representation, and the like. Published in 1992, the essays it contains have been quoted with amazing frequency in scholarly research since then.

for example, it includes Lori Chamberlain's essay comparing the metaphors used to describe the role of translation with historical constructions of the feminine; Richard Jacqemond's systematic analysis of North-south dynamics in translation using the specific case of translation between France and the Arab world; Suzanne Jill Levine's essay on the subversive potential of translation, and a number of other insightful essays.

It is a must have for the library of anyone interested in translation studies.